As the world continues to freak out about COVID-19, the advice from the authorities about what to do seems disproportionate to the the panic they're stoking - wash your hands, don't go out unless you have to, avoid crowds. It seems like a recipe for making people panic.

While the MSM have continually poo-pooed any and all alternative therapies in protecting or treating coronavirus infections, they've ignored actual evidence from the very people who have experience with what the rest of the world is currently experiencing; namely Wuhan China. Specifically, doctors who were on the front lines in China during the worst of the epidemic are singing the praises of vitamin C infusions.

Today on Objective:Health, we take a look at one of our old favorites for multiple conditions, including coronavirus infections - the mighty vitamin C. Taking vitamin C is actually something everyone could be doing to make a difference in the state of their immune system, well beyond 'wash your hands'.

The only certainty about the 'novel' virus is that a great deal of nonsense is being talked about it by people who really ought to know better, and a great deal of opportunism is being displayed.

From Netanyahu grabbing the chance to postpone his corruption trial to Hollywood starlets claiming they have 'tested positive' (surely not a sad and cynical attempt to up their profile), this bandwagon is seething and teeming with those trying to seize their moment of fame or get rich or stay out of jail or just join in the mayhem.

It's cool to be nCoV-positive now. Maybe that's why such inordinate numbers of famous people are staking their claim to it.

Meanwhile, the propaganda is relentless, and there's a variety for all tastes.

Comment: Spot on. We know of only a handful of other alt-media sites and commentators who see through this scam.

It's pretty shocking how many people have departed aboard the Coronavirus Cruise, destination unknown, which speaks to people's fickle natures. Remember, just because someone sounds like they're on your team - politics or culture-wise - they may in fact not be, at all.

Just in case anyone doesn't understand why you can, or should, be skeptical about the severity of the alleged threat from the corona virus.

As it played out between early 2009 and late 2010, the 'swine flu' pandemic is estimated to have infected up to 1.4 billion people around the world and killed anywhere between 150,000 and 575,000 ('the flu' is almost never recorded as the cause of death on certificates). While many governments did, at the time, talk up the threat from that virus, there was nothing like the level of hysteria that we are seeing today in relation to 'corona virus'. Today, many political leaders are talking in overwrought, impassioned terms about the corona virus that are completely disconnected from the actual infection rates and fatalities it has caused.

I practice Family Medicine in Europe and as everybody knows by now, we're in the midst of Coronavirus madnessTM which we are told is now an official global pandemic. It's true that we're living through a critical, decisive and increasingly divisive era, but the real issue is something other than what the media and politicians would have us believe.

Let's review our society's problems for some much needed perspective.

Very Dark Statistics, Indeed

Regardless of how many people on the planet are actively aware of it, the truth is that tens of millions of people drop like flies from illness, depression and self-destructionevery single day. And that's a trend that has been ongoing for, well, a very long time.

According to the WHO assessment of deaths by cause for the years 2000-2016, close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. And those who have been paying attention will know that, in the past few years, the generalized state of the public's mental health has not improved.

This is not a test of our commitment to basic hygiene or disaster preparedness or our ability to come together as a nation in times of crisis, although we're not doing so well on any of those fronts.

No, what is about to unfold over the next few weeks is a test to see how well we have assimilated the government's lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we'll march in lockstep with the government's dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government's power grabs when made in the name of national security.

Most critically of all, this is a test to see whether the Constitution — and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights — can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

Here's what we know: whatever the so-called threat to the nation — whether it's civil unrest, school shootings, alleged acts of terrorism, or the threat of a global pandemic in the case of COVID-19 — the government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation's heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state.

I have always been very fond of this photo, for reasons which are perhaps obvious. We are left to right Celia, Stuart, Neil, Craig and throughout our childhood we really were that close and that happy. The reason that I post this now is that my mother always told me she was amazed how good we looked in the photo, because it was taken when we were all off school sick with Hong Kong flu.

The Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968/9 was the last really serious flu pandemic to sweep the UK. They do seem extraordinarily regular - 1919, 1969 and 2020. Flu epidemics have much better punctuality than the trains (though I cheated a bit there and left out the 1958 "Asian flu"). Nowadays "Hong Kong flu" is known as H3N2. Estimates for deaths it caused worldwide vary from 1 to 4 million. In the UK it killed an estimated 80,000 people.

If the current coronavirus had appeared in 1968, it would simply have been called "flu", probably "Wuhan flu". COVID-19 may not be nowadays classified as such, but in my youth flu is definitely what we would have called it. The Hong Kong flu was very similar to the current outbreak in being extremely contagious but with a fairly low mortality rate. 30% of the UK population is estimated to have been infected in the Hong Kong flu pandemic. The death rate was about 0.5%, mostly elderly or with underlying health conditions.

Today we discuss the key practices and processes by which individuals come to know themselves, others, and the divine, according to Timothy Ashworth's interpretation of the Apostle Paul's thought in his book Paul's Necessary Sin. Since 'The Fall', humanity has suffered from a 'darkening of the mind' or an identification with the things created - our own physical existence - and a blindness to higher realities. But this devolution, or 'sin', has a constructive component built in, when the knowledge of sin, as sin, becomes recognized and pointed out for what it is. When an individual sees this in oneself, he or she can then make the choice to think and act differently. The state of sin was necessary in order to gain knowledge about the nature of good and evil.

Paul saw this potential transformation as a way for people not only to form a better connection to others, but also as a path towards humanity's greater and more direct connection to God; a vivifying experience that raised the children of humanity into adults - who no longer required 'the laws' as a guide to living - but whose internal and living connection with the 'unseen' could then direct their lives: what Paul calls "righteousness through faith".

Two horns weren't good enough for survival, so natural selection made two more. Twice as many horns = twice as many offspring. However, a competing, equally ridiculous theory says these were a gift from Satan, whom these goats worship.

Listening to promoters of evolution, like Richard Dawkins, you get the feeling that natural selection is something utterly amazing, on par with Jesus. It's this magical thing that sorts through random mutations, separates the good ones from the bad ones, lets the bad ones disappear, and 'selects for' the good ones, and we get cool new life forms. Whatever living things exist, and many are amazing, to be sure, we're told that natural selection 'made' them. It gave us giraffes and birds and chameleons. But of course, this only makes sense if you don't actually think about it for a few minutes.

Can natural selection (NS) really make things? How would it do that? What power does it really possess? Let's reduce it to the simplest question - what really is natural selection?

"If something manages to reproduce, it passes on its genes to the next generation. Otherwise, not."

That. That's it. That's all of natural selection. It's not a force of any kind. It doesn't "do" anything. It's a passive process, or rather, a commentary on something that has happened. Basically all it says is that whatever survives, survives. Well, no shit, Sherlock. We kinda knew that.

So while it's often talked about as if it was the Jesus of Evolution, it's really nothing much. It doesn't do anything; it doesn't make anything. It just sits on the sidelines and says things like, "Oh look, this guy with the new mutation just had a baby. Oh, that other guy without the mutation also just had a baby. Weird." There's no 'select for' button. (Though if you read Dawkins's books, you might well think there is.)

So how did NS get its almost godly status? Well, the theory that stupid, dead atoms just randomly assemble into better and better things couldn't fool anyone for long, so something godly had to be introduced. Random mutations are random and thus follow the rules of entropy and make things worse, so the only other candidate was NS. I mean, we see all these amazing things around us, and we've decided that they have evolved from less amazing things, and any intelligent input is strictly forbidden, so it must be NS doing that. That's the general idea.

NS turned out to be a great tool because most people can't really imagine what it is, so evolutionists use it as a personification of a godlike force that can do just about anything, and for most people the concept is too vague to find any particular flaws with it. So it was established that NS gets rid of all these deleterious mutations, of which there are plenty, and that it 'selects for' the occasional, rare, beneficial ones. Make sense? If you said yes, then you haven't really thought about it.

The 'gold standard' in nutritional and medical studies is the random controlled trial (RTC) which relies on the fact that neither the experimenters nor the subjects are aware of which subjects are getting the actual intervention or are receiving a placebo (an inert preparation that is indistinguishable from the real substance being tested, be it a pill, an injection, etc.). The idea is that this will control for the bias of both the experimenters and the subjects so that their preconceived notions don't affect the results of the trial.

But a recent controversy has lead many to question the validity of many these studies. It turns out unscrupulous scientists have figured out a way to manipulate the results by using placebos that aren't actually inert substances. The ingredients of the placebos used in trials are often not disclosed (the information being carefully protected, as some researchers and reporters have discovered). It seems that placebo tampering is yet another way for some scientists to manipulate the data to show their drugs are more effective and have less side effects than they actually do.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we look into the implications of placebo tampering. Can we trust any science at all at this point?

The winter remained harsh in the northern hemisphere throughout February with even more cold and snowfall records broken.

70 villages in southeastern Turkey were buried under 20 feet of snow after a powerful blizzard. Residents were left without power and water as they also struggled to dig their way out. Furthermore, two avalanches killed 41 in the eastern part of the country, while a 5.7 magnitude earthquake killed 8 people in the southeast... That's quite a lot of extreme events in a single region.

Haji Omaran, a town on the mountainous Iraq-Iran border, also experienced exceptionally heavy snowfall, with roads blocked and cars buried in the snow. Saudi Arabia also got its share of unusual cold weather (for the desert!) as the temperature dropped to -5°C.

Last but not least, Taiwan's highest peak of Yushan and nearby counties were hit by the heaviest snowfall in two decades, whilst Himachal Pradesh's capital received the highest snowfall in eight years.

Heavy rain continued breaking records around the globe: 2 feet of rain in 24 hours in Fiordland, New Zealand; 5 dead and hundred displaced in Kenya; a month's worth of rain in 3 hours in São Paulo, Brazil; rainfall 400% above normal in Mississippi; hundreds evacuated in Northern Argentina due to widespread flooding, while western Washington got hit by historic flooding and landslides... and that's just to mention some of the most significant events.

At least seven people were killed across Europe by Storm Ciara, heavy rain and strong winds shut down transport and left hundreds of thousands without power. And storm Dennis left its mark in the UK, dumping a month's worth of rain in 48 hours with 91mph winds.

Meteor fireballs also gave quite a show this month, sightings on the rise... at least for now.